I have suffered from clinical
depression, to a greater or lesser degree, for at least the past two decades.
Within that time, I have generally been fine (or at least functional), but I have also experienced a
couple of prolonged episodes of severe depression, one of which I have recently
started to emerge from. If I had to guess, I’d say the first signs of this episode started some time in the late-summer of 2013 and got progressively
worse over the next year. But the very worst of it—which included severe anxiety and
insomnia—started in August of 2014 and lasted for about 8 months. The major
causes are pretty easy to point to: (1) a close
friendship ended in a dramatic and protracted way, and (2) I was under a
tremendous amount of stress as a couple of high-stakes deadlines coincided with
being on the job market (another indescribably stressful process, at least for
me). These two extreme stressors (along with any number of other, less
momentous stressors) resulted in the anxiety and insomnia. In short, I was constantly stressed
out, exhausted, and anxious, all of which worked together in a destructive
feedback loop. It was a really tough period, and though it started to improve
significantly last April, I’ve only really started to feel
like myself again in the past month or so (and that intermittently).
The funny thing (ha!) is I didn’t
even recognize the last two years as a bout of depression until after the worst
part was already over. (Actually, I didn't even recognize it then--my mom pointed it out.) I knew I was stressed and tired and anxious, but there
were all sorts of things I could point to as the direct causes of my distress. In retrospect, however, the distress did not go away when the apparent causes did.
In fact looking back, I recognize whole stretches of time I lost to
avoidance…of anything and everything. I would hole up in my office, turn off
the lights, and basically hide. How anything got done in those two years, I
don’t think I’ll ever be able to fully explain.
The point
of reflecting on these past two years is not to solicit sympathy, but to mark a
point of progress. There is therapeutic value in being able to
identify a period of real misery and begin to pull at some of the various threads. What
were the causes of the misery? What were the symptoms and the signs, especially
the early signs of bad things a-comin’? What could I have done differently? Sooner? With more care? What was good despite the misery? And what
were the consequences? No need for comprehensive answers to any of those
questions here. Lots of people have written about the
personal toll of depression. I’ve taken a lot of solace in the essays, blog posts,
cartoons, and revelations of fellow depressives, especially Allie Brosh’s
“Hyperbole and a Half” (part 1), (part 2) and the Bloggess’s blog (part everything). Lots of commentators also note the collateral damage
of depression for people near and dear to the person suffering. I won’t
rehearse those things here, which have been well rehearsed elsewhere.
I do, however, want to
note one consequence I’ve only recently recognized, which has to do with
the effects of my depression on other people.
Specifically, I missed/passed up a lot of opportunities in the past few years to offer comfort to
other people who were in need of a kind word or gesture because I was so busy
trying to keep my head above water. At first, I thought of these missed opportunities as a form of selfishness. I
think this is pretty obvious. When you’re depressed—even mildly
depressed—sometimes you just don’t notice other people’s suffering, even when
their suffering is severe. When every moment of the day requires crisis-level
triage, you overlook a lot of things that aren’t your crisis. Such
self-interest may be justifiable for someone struggling with depression,
but it still wears on the people around you.
Even when
you do notice, it can be hard to muster the energy to
attend to other people. Without
going too far down the rabbit hole, I think Christine Miserandino’s “Spoon Theory” is useful here. Spoon Theory essentially says
that people struggling with mental and/or physical disabilities have to
be very careful about how they ration their energy. Sometimes running to the
store for a greeting card, writing a note, and sticking it in the mail can
obliterate an entire day’s spoons. When I'm depressed, I get stingy about
caring for others, even in relatively meager ways, because I’m hoarding spoons,
knowing full well that if I spend them too quickly or too frivolously, I’ll
regret it later. And once I start hoarding spoons, it becomes
increasingly easy to justify hoarding. It becomes habitual, made ever
easier by the fact that I don’t always notice other people’s suffering to begin
with.
But when it
comes to comforting others, the real tragedy may be in those times—more common than they might seem—during which you (that is, I) notice someone
you care about who is in need of comfort, you have the energy to
comfort them, but you convince yourself they wouldn’t want to hear from
you. In other words, you convince yourself you can’t be a source of
comfort to people you care about, and even that your comfort may cause them
additional pain. (Can I stop here to say: just typing out those last two
sentences really sucked.) In this case, it's not selfishness at work--it's a weird, stupid, self-destructive selflessness. It's a huge loss for everyone involved, and it's usually invisible to everyone (as well as another feedback loop).
Emerging
from depression has been (and is) a very slow process for me, in part because I
feel like I have to relearn some pretty basic human interaction stuff, the muscles for which have atrophied. And taking stock at points along the way is helpful. And
sometimes writing stuff down is a good way to remind myself that the cock-ups that
result from depression are not elemental failings that spring forth from the unalterable core
of my being (unlike melodrama, which is apparently part of my very fabric). And then
noticing that I spent the time and energy to write something down helps to reassure
me that I’m continuing to emerge. And hopefully that will help me to remember
how to do some of those human interaction things, like comforting the people I care about when they need it. All of this to say, if I err
on the side of over-comforting you in the next couple of months, or if I'm just generally weird, I’d appreciate
it if you’d chalk it up to relearning how to be a functional human person.
